Erskine to RPW Letter 8/25/65

Albert Erskine explains Joe Blotner's delayed visit with Warren. He also mentions the upcoming Vintage edition of Who Speaks for the Negro?. He hopes that the preface for that edition may be delayed as long as possible in order to account for any events that may take place before the Vintage publication date.

Erskine to RPW Letter 8/25/65 Searchable Text

Just a note of explanation. The postponement of Joe Blotner’s visit was really engineered by me for this reason: He was spending the weekend with us, and in the course of it I learned that he had planned a New England circuit with four stops, three of which had been cancelled or postponed. He was still going ahead with the trip to West Wardsboro with nothing to do on the way up or on the way back, and this seemed so senseless to me (to say nothing of expensive) that I talked him into doing what he did—knowing that it could make no real difference to you whether you saw him this week or this fall or winter.

Proposed Vintage preface came this morning. I’ll read and comment soon. I do hope that it can be arranged to hold off until the last possible moment before press time, because at this moment this afterthought is being written closer to the original publication date than to the date of the forthcoming Vintage volume—and who knows what will happen in the next few months.

Related Interviews

Original materials provided by the University of Kentucky and Yale University libraries and digitized with the permission of the Warren estate. Digital archive created and designed by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.